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Where do you want to eat for lunch?

Kate?
Kate: I want to see Timothy again.

Timothy was the chef who cooked dinner at the table at Fuji in Orland Park last week. She ate just a few bites of chicken. It was delicious, she said, but that was all she ate. Timothy was her own chef, and way better than the other chef, she thought.

13 lbs and stuck …

Stuck at 13 lbs for the past week or more. Frustrating but at least not going up. Being a woman has its disadvantages ….

She can say the “S” words now!

Her daddy told me she would, all of a sudden. Be able to say words like “spider”, “school”, “snake”, “stop” that is. for the longest time she wasn’t saying the consonant sound after the “s”. Now she does. We had some fun with that today. Funny how I just noticed it today.

Moving the blog …

Apologies for the virtual mess.  I’m moving my blog to a new platform, and things are not going as I would have them go.

So I've Lost Some Weight

In less than 3 weeks I’ve lost 11 lbs so far. Lots more to go, but it’s a good start. I can’t keep this loss up, it’s not healthy. It is certainly nice to get started like this.

What is really strange is that I’m not really all that hungry. Before I made the commitment to work on my health and such, I’d be hungry at my desk all the time. I was thinking about food a lot. Now it’s suddenly lunch time … and I realize I should eat something. That is definitely a change.

No photo’s of my progress. I haven’t been in too many photos in the last 4 years where I was happy to share how I looked. Hopefully by this time next year …

I Heart Faces – Laughter

She laughs a lot, but I don’t always get to capture that. Lately she’s back to “Stop Taking Pictures Mama!”.

This is from last year, a little session that we did.

Have fun looking at the other entries.

My Loving Mom

Mother’s day, the first one without my my mom. Almost 20 years ago I decided to follow my then boyfriend/future (ex) husband to the USA. I chose to leave my family behind and start a new life, over 4000 miles away from the place where I grew up.

This was very hard on my mother. She feared she’d never see her oldest daughter again. Fortunately this proved to be untrue. My parents visited us twice, once in Albuquerque and once in Illinois. It took 8 years before I was able to pay my first visit “back home”, but since then I visited quite a few times.

I’ll always be grateful for being able to spend the last month of her life with my mom, even though she only spent 5 days of that time (her final days) at home.

In 2004, I goofed up, just a little. I got pregnant. I was single and involved with a man who was unwilling and unable to take on the responsibility of being a father to this child. There were more things contributing to the general mess, but I WAS PREGNANT!

I had actively tried to get pregnant during my first marriage. We’d started trying in 1991, to no avail. There was no clear cause and I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my wish to become a mom would not be granted to me.

My sister was getting married in June, and I was traveling back to the Netherlands to be part of all that. The day after the wedding day, I would tell my mom about the pregnancy. I was nervous. The circumstances surrounding this unborn kiddo were less than ideal. Part of me was so thrilled to finally have seen 2 lines on a pregnancy test, and another part of me was a mess because of the situation in general.

After waking up and coming downstairs, I sat down with my mom, and told her I was expecting. Her first reaction: “I’m so happy for you!”. I’m tearing up as I write this. There was no judgment for being unmarried. Even when I explained the screwed up circumstances, she didn’t judge me. She was happy that finally my wish to be a mom would be granted. She wanted to be an Oma to that baby as much as I wanted to be his/her mom.

Just about a month later I miscarried. It was hard for her that I was so far away, and she couldn’t be there for me. All miscarriages are devastating and sad, this one broke my heart at the time. Thanks to loving friends I didn’t have to go through it completely alone.

Shortly after that I met Mike, and only 4 months after meeting him I conceived Kate. The girl who finally made me a mommy! My family was a bit shocked at the speed of light with which we got pregnant. (December 31st, celebratory dinner, I was going to move in with him, some wine was involved …)

When Kate was due, my mom was in the hospital with cardiac problems. I was given explicit permission to call my mother the moment the baby was born, so that my mom could get to the business of getting better. I did. And she and her roommate had a little party (with rusk and anise sprinkles, a Dutch tradition).

She had hoped to come visit her granddaughter a few months later, but the doctor would not clear her to fly, it was to risky health wise. She had to wait exactly one year until she finally met her long awaited grandchild. It was Kate’s first birthday.

My mom wasn’t perfect, she made mistakes, like all of us. One thing she had down was unconditional love for her children. We did things that hurt her, made her sad, but … her love and affection never stopped.

Happy Mothers Day mom. I’ll miss you a bit more today.

Color Memory Test

I read a blog by John Paul Caponigro. He had a post on color memory. He showed this color:

Then he showed how his students fared in matching that color from memory (all at the original post.

I thought I’d give that green a try:

Came fairly close, IMO, a bit less saturated and lighter. Next step is to try that with a bunch more colors.

Wilma

A Sad Day For Apeldoorn

It’s a sad day for Apeldoorn. It’s normally a nice and friendly town. The surroundings are beautiful. I grew up there, it was a wonderful place to grow up. I was just there, on a visit to Opa, with Kate. We’d actually tried to get a flight for this time, so we could enjoy the Queen’s day festivities, but the cost of plane tickets was a lot higher than I wanted to pay.

New York Times: Royal Family Target of Car Attack in Netherlands Some lunatic ran his car through barricades, possibly aiming for the bus that was transporting the royal family. He missed the bus but injured several people and killed five.

For 5 years I drove by that monument on my way to high school. When Mike visited the Netherlands for the first time, we stayed at the hotel overlooking that intersection. Kate took her first serious walking steps there, I remember that vividly.

I’m glad my sister (who was watching the parade) was a very safe distant away.

Going on the record …

It’s that time in my life again … I need to consciously make a commitment to work on my weight. Only 4 or 5 years ago (before I got pregnant) I had just lost 99 lbs and looked and felt great. I’m embarrassed to admit that most of that weight is back again. It’s obvious that this is not going to come off by just “kind of” keeping an eye on things.

When I was on my trip to the Netherlands I didn’t watch what I ate at all, and actually gained quite a bit in those 4 weeks. I kept thinking “I’ll work on it when I get home”. It’s so much harder with a family, especially when you have a skinny kid and stepkids.

What worked for me last time was just simply telling everyone that I was going to do it. I didn’t want to fail in front of the eyes of the world. So here it is: I’m going to modify my eating habits and activities habits in order to become healthier and lose weight.

There ya go.